Fond farewell to Herald’s Barbie
As technology improved and people could email in copy, she began to reinvent her role and ultimately joined the designers on the layout side of things.
Barbara Waters has retired after 36 years with the South Coast Herald. How can that be, you may say, when she doesn’t look a day over 32.
Colleagues enjoyed a farewell function for her last Friday, sharing funny stories and highlights from over the years.
Barbs, or Barbie, as she is affectionately known, has been part of the furniture since taking up a typing position ‘back in the day’.
Her job, in the days before the modern computers and emails, was to retype all the handwritten submitted copy. And there was plenty of it.
The trays at her desk would overflow with paper, sometimes to the extent that you could only just see her blonde hair above it as you walked up the two stairs into production.
She’d fly through the work at breakneck speed, performing a vital role in the production department, enabling the smooth flow of work.
As technology improved and people could email in copy, she began to reinvent her role and ultimately joined the designers on the layout side of things.
After the retirement of long-time production manager Wally Archer, she became new production manager Brennan Raymond’s ‘2 ic’.
This was a job she performed with considerable aplomb despite sometimes doubting her own abilities.
Being in the production department on deadline can be a crazy place at times, yet through it all she kept a cool head and maintained her sense of humour. Well, mostly!
You knew things needed to be sorted out in a hurry if you saw Barbie march from production to editorial, so fast that her hair would actually flow, blow back!
She will be greatly missed, but fully deserves her retirement.
Hopefully, she can get to do many of the things she enjoys, one being a possible visit to family in New Zealand.
As long as, of course, she doesn’t forget to either adopt or return to feed the production cat!
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